Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25059
Photographs by Wayne Levi n. words by Thomas Farber (Editions Limited) If getting past flesh and bones is the first step toward spiritual evolution, then the next step might be moving past terrestrial life, which is exactly what Wayne Levin has done in his new book Through A Liquid Mirror. His underwater findings are cap tured exclusively in black and white and stand as a grand meditation on the way our subconscious perceives what lurks down below. From a photographic standpoint, there is a sharp display of technical skill. From a waterman's perspective, the views might be described as "amphibi ous" (Levin visits places few men dare to go). His subjects range from bodysurfers to sharks to sunken ships to kids discovering the joys of agua for the first time. Through a Liquid Mirror captures the way life might be seen if we all had gills.-Jamie Brisick Fi fty Years of Europe: An Album By Jan Morris (Vi llard Books) In 30-plus books over the last 50 years, the peripatetic transsexual British author, Jan Morris, has depicted the exquisite and the cruel in nearly every culture on the globe. Able to glide across genres and guis es with a cartographer's rigor and a historian's acumen for detail, she notably crossed the great gender divide when her desire for sexual reas signment was surgically completed in 1972. (Morris chronicled this expe rience a year later in Conundrum.) Fifty Years of Europe is pure Morris-wistful in her nostalgia for a Europe that might never have been, and cunning in her exposition of what it might very well become. Waltzing with a familiar Europe like an old lover, Morris examines it in the aftermath of World War II, and assesses its current millenial urge to re-imagine itself. Obliquely, the book is also a memoir. Morris returns 50 years later to the Molo Audace in Trieste, Italy, where she (as a he) was stationed during World War II. It is there-"at the cusp of Europe, where the races meet, where [she] can look one way toward Rome and Paris and London, the other toward Belgrade and Bucharest and Athens"-that the book begins and ends. Fortunately for us all, this isn't likely to be her last trip.-TB